Category: Data

Twitter is still figuring out how to extract the most value from its data business, which grew 53% over the past year, according to papers the company filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company has clamped down on the amount of data that outside firms are allowed to pull from its system free of charge…

Many smaller analytics startups are now turning to four companies that Twitter has dubbed “certified data resellers.” These brokers, Gnip, Data Sift, Topsy and the Japanese firm NTT Data account for the bulk of Twitter’s data revenue. Last year, they paid Twitter monthly fees of about $35.6 million. via Twitter’s Lucrative Data Mining Business – WSJ.com.

Drawbridge, founded by a former Google data scientist, says it has matched 1.5 billion devices this way, allowing it to deliver mobile ads based on Web sites the person has visited on a computer. If you research a Hawaiian vacation on your work desktop, you could see a Hawaii ad that night on your personal cellphone.

And a bit about how it works:

Drawbridge, which was founded by Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, formerly at AdMob, the Google mobile ad network, has partnerships with various online publishers and ad exchanges. These send partners a notification every time a user visits a Web site or mobile app, which is considered an opportunity to show an ad. Drawbridge watches the notifications for behavioral patterns and uses statistical modeling to determine the probability that several devices have the same owner and to assign that person an anonymous identifier.

So if someone regularly checks a news app on a phone in bed each morning, browses the same news site from a laptop in the kitchen, visits from that laptop at an office an hour later and returns that night on a tablet in the same home, Drawbridge concludes that those devices belong to the same person. And if that person shopped for airplane tickets at work, Drawbridge could show that person an airline ad on the tablet that evening.

Media6Degees pioneered a rich data science approach to predicting brand affinity. Today they’re rebranding as Dstillery. Here’s a peek at what’s behind the name change and how the company knows more about what you want to buy than you could ever imagine.

More than a new coat of paint, the company has fully integrated technology from mobile media-buying and -targeting company EveryScreen Media, which it acquired in mid-July. EveryScreen effectively turbocharges the mobile arm of Dstillery’s technology, which is so intuitive about what you might buy, it’s difficult to explain.

On them solving the multiscreen problem:

Dstillery is now able to use the person’s IP address. Then with what Phillips cryptically calls “some advanced data science,” Dstillery can associate devices across that IP address. “We can associate a laptop with a smartphone.

Facebook confirmed to me that beyond the news outlets and analytics firms that it announced today would gain Public Feed and Keyword Insights API access, brands and advertising agencies will also get to gander at your conversations. “It’s definitely something we’re exploring,” a Facebook spokesperson told me. It’s not going to be a free-for-all. “It won’t be open to anybody. It’s something we’ll need to partner with people on,” the company said.

When someone “connects” to Facebook using their Gmail, Yahoo, Twitter, Outlook or whatever account, Facebook will ask for permission to access your contacts to “find your friends on Facebook”. While Facebook may actually be trying to find their friend’s profiles on Facebook, Facebook is also harvesting all of that contact data and using it to create “shadow profiles” based on name and email address information.

Custom audiences is one of the most powerful features found in Facebook Ads. A custom audience is a set of “users” that you upload (usually in the form of email addresses) in a CSV or Excel file to Facebook. Facebook then looks at their users and tries to find the users in the set you uploaded to make a match. If a match is found, they place that user into the custom audience. From there, you can target any of your ad types specifically to this custom audience.

I thought of this story, revealed at Peterson’s murder trial which I occasionally attended, when a prominent data broker announced two weeks ago that it had begun selling locational information on license plates that have been filmed and identified. In recent years, police have also widely embraced license plate recognition to track suspected criminals.

Interactive Advertising Bureau general counsel Mike Zaneis confirmed to Business Insider that the adtech business has proposed that “we could possibly honor all DNT flags” if, in return, the ad businesses were still allowed to use anonymous, “de-identified” data for ad targeting. (See Zaneis’ full statement below.)